The X Window System (commonly X11, or X) is a networking and display protocol which provides windowing on bitmap displays. It is the de-facto standard for implementation graphical user interfaces. See the [[Xorg]] article for details.

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[[Wayland]] is a new display server protocol and the Weston reference implementation is available. There is very little support for it from applications at this early stage of development.

The community-maintained Arch wiki is an excellent resource and should be consulted for issues first. The IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/#archlinux), and the forums are also available if the answer cannot be found elsewhere. Also, be sure to check out the man pages for any command you are unfamiliar with; this can usually be invoked with man command.

Download

A single image is provided which can be booted into an i686 and x86_64 live system to install Arch Linux over the network. Media containing the [core] repository are no longer provided.

Install images are signed and it is highly recommend to verify their signature before use. On Arch Linux, this can be done by using

pacman-key -v <iso-file>.sig

The image can be burned to a CD, mounted as an ISO file, or directly written to a USB stick using a utility like dd. It is intended for new installations only; an existing Arch Linux system can always be updated with pacman -Syu.

Installation

Keyboard layout

For many countries and keyboard types appropriate keymaps are available already, and a command like loadkeys uk might do what you want. More available keymap files can be found in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/ (you can omit the keymap path and file extension when using loadkeys).

Format the partitions

Mount the partitions

We now must mount the root partition on /mnt. You should also create directories for and mount any other partitions (/mnt/boot, /mnt/home, ...) if you want them to be detected by genfstab.

Connect to the internet

A DHCP service is already enabled for all available devices. If you need to setup a static IP or use management tools such as Netcfg, you should stop this service first: systemctl stop dhcpcd.service. For more information read configuring network.

Wireless

Install the base system

Before installing, you may want to edit /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist such that your preferred mirror is first. This copy of the mirrorlist will be installed on your new system by pacstrap as well, so it's worth getting it right.

Using the pacstrap script we install the base system. The base-devel package group should also be installed if you plan on compiling software from the AUR or using ABS.

# pacstrap /mnt base base-devel

Other packages can be installed by appending their names to the above command (space seperated), including the bootloader if you want.

Configure the bootloader: refer back to the appropriate article from the bootloader installation section.

Set a root password with passwd.

Unmount and reboot

If you are still in the chroot environment type exit or press Template:Keypress in order to exit.
Earlier we mounted the partitions under /mnt. In this step we will unmount them:

# umount /mnt/{boot,home,}

Now reboot and then login into the new system with the root account.

Post-installation

User management

Add any user accounts you require as as described in User management. It isn't good practice to use the root account for regular use, or expose it via SSH on a server. The root account should only be used for administrative tasks.

Package management

Service management

Arch Linux uses systemd as init, which is a system and service manager for Linux. For maintaining your Arch Linux installation, it is a good idea to learn the basics about it. Interaction with systemd is done through the systemctl command. Read systemd#Basic systemctl usage for more information.

Sound

ALSA usually works out-of-the-box. It just needs to be unmuted. Install alsa-utils (which contains alsamixer) and follow these instructions.

ALSA is included with the kernel and it is recommended. If it does not work, OSS is a viable alternative. If you have advanced audio requirements, take a look at Sound system for an overview of various articles.

Video driver

The Linux kernel includes open-source video drivers and support for hardware accelerated framebuffers. However, userland support is required for OpenGL and 2D acceleration in X11.

If you don't know which video chipset is available on your machine, run:

$ lspci | grep VGA

For a complete list of open-source video drivers, search the package database:

$ pacman -Ss xf86-video | less

The vesa driver is a generic mode-setting driver that will work with almost every GPU, but will not provide any 2D or 3D acceleration. If a better driver cannot be found or fails to load, Xorg will fall back to vesa. To install it:

# pacman -S xf86-video-vesa

In order for video acceleration to work, and often to expose all the modes that the GPU can set, a proper video driver is required:

Display server

The X Window System (commonly X11, or X) is a networking and display protocol which provides windowing on bitmap displays. It is the de-facto standard for implementation graphical user interfaces. See the Xorg article for details.

Wayland is a new display server protocol and the Weston reference implementation is available. There is very little support for it from applications at this early stage of development.

Fonts

You may wish to install a set of TrueType fonts, as only unscalable bitmap fonts are included by default. DejaVu is a set of high quality, general-purpose fonts with good Unicode coverage:

# pacman -S ttf-dejavu

Refer to Font Configuration for how to configure font rendering and Fonts for font suggestions and installation instructions.